n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South. | Read more..

Betwixt Worlds

Submitted by Stephen Wright on Tue, 2011-10-25 00:32
80mundos

Which is ultimately the more felicitous title: Jules Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days? Or Julio Cortázar's cross-purposed variant, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds? The former heralds an awe-inspiring feat in the era of colonial expansion, while the latter seeks to capture the dizzying heterogeneity of our own collaged temporalities -- wheeling motionless through time at eighty-worlds-a-day. One world or many?
 
07/04/2012 - 30/09/2012 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Book Reports

Submitted by Parchai on Mon, 2011-07-04 19:55
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The past few months n.e.w.s. has been engaged with projects in Bangalore, Amsterdam and Paris that all form research for our forthcoming book: Arbitrating Attention. During the course of this summer, we will pick up the newsworthy thread and continue sharing our research at n.e.w.s. 'Book reports' will be a 100-day textual marathon of relatively short, snappy but argued reviews of primarily books, although these could expand into the ubiquitous url or PDF or even You Tube video. These 'books' are all those by extension that we have been compelled to read in whole or in part for Arbitrating Attention. That particular purpose of the readings will determine the perspective of the series and therefore provide insight in the structure of our forthcoming book.
 
18/04/2011 - 18/04/2011 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Test drive of Narcissus and (Re)search

Submitted by Renée Ridgway on Tue, 2011-03-29 08:49
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CIS (Centre for Internet and Society) hosts an interesting line-up on the 31st of March with the test drive of the Narcissus algorithm and further (Re)search. Last year, n.e.w.s. organized an open call: Shadow Search, which was looking for a specific algorithm. In particular this search engine would allow prospectors in the world of information and databases to discover ‘shadow art activities’ that are partially hidden, off-the-radar, stealthy. Last year a jury gathered at CIS to evaluate the 5 entries and after much deliberation, a winner was chosen, 'Narcissus', by Phil Jones and Aharon Amir. This algorithm is now being launched at CIS on March 31, 2011.

The corpus of objects being tested by the Narcissus search engine is the data uploaded from the students from the Dutch Art Institute, Srishti School of Art, Design, Technology, Shantiniketan and CKP for 'Space the Final Frontier'. The past three weeks the students have been indexing the shadow worlds of Bangalore with various art projects, which were physically exhibited at CKP on March 17th, 2011. The Shadow Search Platform (SSP) will continue at the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology this year as a full-time project, in which various aspects of art-related activities as well as their visibility, searchability and accessibility will be investigated by participants and visiting faculty.
 
03/03/2011 - 19/03/2011 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Space the Final Frontier

Submitted by Renée Ridgway on Sun, 2011-03-13 09:35
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n.e.w.s. contributors Prayas Abhinav and Renée Ridgway team up for Space the Final Frontier, Mission I: Indexing the Shadow Worlds of Bangalore, March 4-18, 2011 with their respective institutions, Dutch Art Institute / ArtEZ (DAI), Srishti, School of Art and Design and CEMA, The Centre for Experimental Media Arts.

http://spacethefinalfrontier.net

Negotiating Equity is the name of one of the ongoing & energetic projects at the heart of the DAI ‘s curriculum. The nine student participants in Negotiating Equity are now embarking on a two-week voyage to India to collaborate with Srishti School of Art and Design and CEMA (The Centre for Experimental Media Arts). Their first pit stop will be New Delhi with a half-day seminar with Raqs Media Collective and a visit to Khoj, an artist led, alternative space for experimentation and international exchange.

Upon arrival in the IT capital Bangalore, Space The Final Frontier commences, an expansive trans-spatial /trans-local investigation into the notion of ‘space’.
 
Thursday, 09. September 2010 | 00:00 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Oops, we did it.

Submitted by Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff on Mon, 2010-11-08 10:24

In our continues efforts to setup the Shadow Search Project (SSP) in order to provide a space where people can experiment with data, build new algorithms and link new indexes of information, n.e.w.s. contributor Renée Ridgway and I decided (a weekend before the submission deadline) to enter a competition called ‘Kom Je Ook?’ to be held on September the 9th 2010. This competition was organized by Mediamatic to select the most interesting pitch at the conference. The prize was to offer a ‘clinic’ at Mediamatic with Stichting DOEN as a chance for funding for the best ideas presented.
 
31/05/2010 - 31/05/2010 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

n.e.w.s. at Kuda.org

Submitted by Renée Ridgway on Mon, 2010-11-08 20:17
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n.e.w.s. was invited to Kuda by Branka Curcic to present the platform as well as to discuss the past and present forums. In relation to Novi-Sad and the postsocialist context, 'Cutting Slack' forum was first mentioned in regard to its diverse perspectives on work in art-related activities. We ended with the text 'The Praise of Laziness' by Mladen Stilinovic in which the last words of his manifesto state: “Finally to be lazy and conclude: there is no art without laziness" added by Katherine Carl. Although many contributors to the forum were admittedly self-proclaimed slackers to a certain extent, the speed and tempo in which the forum took off was contradictory to the content. There was no laziness here - but it should be mentioned that it was just after New Year's, in a month where the much of the world slows down and many seem to have more time than during other months of the year. So many users as well as lurkers were also reading along and it was one of n.e.w.s.'s most trafficked and followed forums! In any case this brought us to the dilemma at hand, the 'Paid Usership' forum and how to come up with ways to find support for artistic endeavor. Feedback from the Kuda group declared the constant struggle to find time and that it takes longer to produce content in another language, while their was a great amount of solidarity with n.e.w.s. contributor Branka Curcic and Kristian Lukic. They are working on similar issues and developing texts that we are looking forward to reading in the near future.
 

Shadow Search Platform (SSP)

Submitted by Parchai on Fri, 2010-05-14 17:59

In October 2009 n.e.w.s. had organised an open call for proposals http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/392 which looked at implementing the Shadow Search ideas http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/395, developing an algorithm that would find off-the-radar or stealth activities. The winner and 4 shortlisted proposals answered our initial query but also led to more questioning regarding the nature of search and its future potentials and well as pitfalls.

We are now working on developing the Shadow Search Platform (SSP), a platform for rapid prototypings and a fleamarket for shadowy search algorithms. It will also look at retrieval systems as filters. What we are planning to develop at this meeting is the backstory, the backend of what the concept of 'search' envelops. This search project (SSP) intends to go beyond interface design.

n.e.w.s. would like to continue with the second competition of the Shadow Search Platform(SSP) by putting forth an open call this summer with something that might be entitled ''(Re)search'. Now we have all this information how do we find what we are looking for?
 

Panopticon 2.0

Submitted by Stephen Wright on Sat, 2010-05-15 02:28

In the spirit of May...  I have some pretty serious reservations about the fundamental assumptions of the SSP. Is there not some kind of embedded assumption that the shadow practices the SSP hopes to bring to light are being unfairly relegated to the shadows by the attention economy, which was somehow excluding them? My reading of our political and art-historical moment is that they are doing their damnedest to stay in the shadows. "SSP attempts to shed light upon precisely these cultural dark areas": that self-description makes the SSP seem uncannily similar to the sorts of initiatives that would appeal to counter-insurgency operatives in our State intelligence agencies. With a perverse twist of the thumbscrew, I must say, because the so-called user-community is being asked to "devise their own ways of interpreting and prioritizing parameters of visibility" -- to some extent, that is, to "out" their peers who for reasons which, in our proto-fascist biopolitical moment, are perfectly legitimate, prefer to impair their coefficient of visibility. For them, the big-Other is a given, but they seek to keep the big-Other as an unknowing witness, playing incognito just beneath his nose.

It is interesting to know what is going on in the shadows for sure. But yielding to the scopic drive to "shed light on them" is a fancy way of colonizing yet another, fragile and marginal part of the lifeworld -- bringing the artefacts into the purview of the general gaze -- and pushing the shadows still further into the infrathin. This is not just a logical paradox; given the reasons for going underground, it is an ethical contradiction.

Thus SSP has thus only one problem: its bearings are off by 180°. Shouldn't the emphasis be on aiding a proliferation of conversations between small-others and abetting them in their desire to sustain their invisibility in the face of predatory searchlights?

 

 

SSP

Submitted by Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff on Sat, 2010-05-15 09:27

I think there is nothing in the projects that aims to shed light on those that which to remain un-illuminated, but more so to introduce a means by which buried or un-indexed content can rise to the surface, can be found, or otherwise re-attributed if desired, not a mere turning around of the current logic effectively commercializing them. Everything has always been a dance between mainstream and underground, between destruction, balance and creation; the one cannot exist without the other. This project is not about those you are referring to, although it is important to keep in mind that not everything needs to be indexed. The new indexes will be made by and with people who are part of the networks that will be included (be it particular art movements or others such as the Amsterdam squatter movement), projects that are not hiding for the searchlight but who are unfortunately out of the crude trajectory of those searchlights as a result of elements such as ranking based on popularity. Other then indexing these non-indexed content, I believe a big part of the project also aims to explore the means by which one can search/browse/explore/surf within these sets of data, not necessarily hooking them up to some sort of evil capitalist mainframe but exploring alternative means of search within the sets, giving users/content owners the freedom to choose their level of exposure.